Mar 15, 2016

The OGC Members recently approved release of all the public OGC Engineering Reports that resulted from the 2015 OGC Interoperability Testbed 11 Testbed 11 is the most recently completed of the OGC’s long series of major geospatial interoperability initiatives. Five of the 26 Testbed 11 Engineering Reports focused on Aviation Information Management, as reported last November. Twenty-one others are now available on the OGC Public Engineering Reports web page.

Estimated Article Reading Time: 7 min.

Use cases and scenarios provided by Testbed 11 sponsoring organizations defined a set of important interoperability requirements. Testbed 11’s participating technology providers first assisted in refining these requirement statements and then worked to develop open standards based solutions that address the requirements. The Engineering Reports describe prototypes, work in progress on potential new OGC standards, and work done to validate candidate standards or improve existing OGC standards. While OGC Engineering Reports are not standards, the information they contains is intended to be useful to both developers of OGC standards and implementers of OGC standards.

OGC Testbed 11 GeoPackaging Engineering Report: Describes an approach for the use of various standards to achieve the creation and synchronization of SQLite databases that conform to the OGC GeoPackage standard.

OGC Testbed 11 Multi-dimensional GeoPackage Supporting Terrain and Routes Engineering Report: Describes the work carried out in the OGC Testbed-11 for multidimensional terrain and routing support on SQLite databases that conform to the OGC GeoPackage standard.

Testbed 11 Referenceable Grid Harmonization ER: Responds to the urgent need to make climate information and related data from a wide array of remote imaging systems readily available for the public and government decision makers to prepare for changes in the Earth’s climate.

OGCTestbed-11 WFS-T Information Exchange Architecture: Addresses assessment of the conformance level of implementations of the OGC Web Feature Service Interface Standard (WFS) to determine if implementations conform to the minimum requirements of the WFS standard and to determine whether a server offers additional, upcoming and complementary capabilities such as support for REST and GeoJSON.

Reference Case Study of Multiple WFS-T Interoperability ER: Describes work done to support multiple WFS-T instance interoperability in transactions between clients and multiple WFS-T servers as well as transactions between the servers themselves, especially in enterprise-to-enterprise data synchronization.

Testbed 11 DGIWG GMLJP2 Testing ER: Describes work done to test the OGCGML in JPEG 2000 for Geographic Imagery Encoding (GMLJP2) Standard in terms of defining a DGIWG GMLJP2 version 1 profile. This Testbed 11 activity is a response to the need for harmonization between DGIWG and OGC

Cross-Community Interoperability

Implementing JSON/GeoJSON in an OGC Standard: Made advances in semantic mediation approaches for data discovery, access and use of heterogeneous data models and heterogeneous metadata models.

Implementing Linked Data and Semantically Enabling OGC Services ER: Provides an overview of existing standards for geosemantics, outlines the approaches adopted during the testbed, and describes the conceptual semantic models and services developed during this testbed to leverage Linked Data and semantic enabled OGC web services.

Testbed 11 Use of Semantic Linked Data with RDF for National Map National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) and Gazetteer Data ER: Provides guidelines on the publication of hydrographic and hydrological data serialized as Resource Description Framework (RDF) using Linked Data principles and technologies based on OGC standards.

OGC® Testbed 11 Catalogue Service and Discovery Engineering Report: Provides a comprehensive review and comparison in terms of architecture, functionality, and usability of the OGC Catalogue Service standards CSW 2.0.2 and CSW 3.0.

Incorporating Social Media in Emergency Response ER: Describes an approach for incorporating Social Media for Emergency Response applications that use spatial data infrastructures and reports on findings about the advancements using Social Media and VGI resources.

Symbology Mediation ER: Reviews standards relevant to symbology mediation and describes conceptual models and services developed to address semantic mediation and portrayal of feature information in Emergency Management and Aviation.

Testbed 11 SOAP Interface Engineering Report: Provides an overview of the current situation and guidance on future SOAP harmonization across all OGC Web services.

Geo4NIEM

The National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) program, a U.S. government initiative, helps organizations and governments share critical information in the areas of emergency management, intelligence, infrastructure protection, law enforcement and more, all of which have substantial need for geospatial support. Ardent Management Consulting, Inc. (“ArdentMC”), a small business consulting firm, was one of the firms assisting the OGC in the Geo4NIEM part of Testbed 11. The OGC served as a subcontractor to ArdentMC in this effort.

Testbed 11 – Implementing Common Security Across the OGC Suite of Service Standards: Describes Common Security for all OGC Web Service Standards.

Geo4NIEM Architecture Design and Implementation ER and Fact Sheet: Assesses the potential for the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) to be combined with security tags from Intelligence Community (IC) Data Encoding Specifications for information exchange using OGC standards.

Test and Demonstration Results for NIEM Using IC Data Encoding Specifications ER: In the Geo4NIEM thread Participants assessed IC Security Markings and Need to Know tagging. They also demonstrated how to provide access control to NIEMIEPs served through a WFS instance. This ER also describes how security was implemented in the demonstration environment, meeting information exchange needs while simplifying the implementation of NIEM and IC security specifications.

NIEM-GML-NIEM Round Trip Assessment and Recommendations ER: In the Geo4NIEM thread, participants assessed security and dissemination control markings leveraging multiple IC Data Encoding Specifications while providing appropriate access control to NIEMIEPs served through a WFS server. They demonstrated a round-trip workflow process that included creation, transfer, receipt, modification, return, and acceptance of XML content originating as NIEMIEPs.

NIEM-GML Feature Processing API using OGC Web Services ER: The round-trip assessment described in the NIEM-GML-NIEM Round Trip Assessment and Recommendations ER was conducted by implementing prototype components that use a ‘NIEM-IC Feature Processing API’ in a functional test environment. This ER describes four service interfaces, encoding and information exchange frameworks that were considered during the development: 1) OGC Web Feature Service; 2) OGC Filter Encoding; 3) IC Data Encoding Specifications; and 4) NIEM 3.0.

The Kickoff Event for the remaining threads of the Testbed 12 Interoperability Initiative was held at the USGS Headquarters in Reston, VA on Wednesday through Friday, March 2-4, the week before the recent OGC Technical Committee meeting in Washington, DC. The Aviation Thread kickoff meeting was held in January 2016.

Yearly OGC Testbeds are the principal activity of the OGC Interoperability Program and the main means by which the OGC membership, OGC’s testbed sponsors, and OGC’s partner standards organization have made spatial information an integral part of the world’s information infrastructure.

In a testbed’s planning phase, Sponsors and Participants define use cases and weave them into a scenario. Then the technology providers use a rapid prototyping process to develop and test candidate standards that enable successful and dramatic enactment of the scenario at the end of the testbed.

Shared investment in free and open spatial standards brings improved sharing and integration of spatial information. Such sharing and integration has widespread and longstanding value for society at large. Technology sponsors share the cost, for their organizations and for the benefit of society, of developing broadly useful interoperability innovations. Technology providers gain market exposure, market intelligence, and a chance to quickly take advantage of the business opportunities that arise with the introduction of new standards and associated technical capabilities.

At the March 2-4 Kickoff Event, Testbed 12 Sponsors and OGC Staff presented the interoperability requirements and objectives for the six Testbed 12 threads:

After 8 months of development work, in November of this year participating technology providers will demonstrate successful interoperability in all of the use cases in a dramatic demonstration based on the scenario. These Participants will deliver completed OGC Engineering Reports for public review and deliberation in the OGC Standards Program. The reports will become Discussion Papers, candidate OGC standards, revisions to existing OGC standards, or best practices for using OGC standards and related standards from other standards development organizations.

Details surrounding the Testbed 12 technology threads and the entire Testbed 12 Architecture can be found in Annex B of the RFQ and in the RFQ’s clarifications document.

Anybody wishing to learn more about this initiative, or about the OGC Interoperability Program in general, can contact Scott Serich, Director, Interoperability Programs (techdesk [at] opengeospatial.org) or visit http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/programs/ip.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 515 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at www.opengeospatial.org/contact.